Tuesday, 7 June 2016

Hello there. I've combed through the autumn catalogues to add to my ongoing stats on original German fiction by gender. Here's the table. I counted first-time hardcover publications written in German, classified by the publishers as "Belletristik", so broadly fiction, essays, poetry. There are 33 publishing houses in the count.

Some publishers are doing really well, publishing equal numbers of make and female (identifying) writers – dtv, DuMont, KiWi, Klett Cotta/Tropen. And some are even bringing out more books by women than by men this autumn: Aufbau, btb, CH Beck, List, Ullstein, Rütten & Loening and notably Matthes & Seitz, with three ladies in their German fiction/Naturkunden catalogue and only one dude.

Everyone else – not so much. There are twenty publishers publishing more men than women and eight houses not bringing us a single female German fiction writer this coming season. All in all, only 37% of original German fiction covered by my count was written by women.